Two-way streets north, south, east and west

Many freshly minted managers will try to score in the "friendliness" account by stating in front of their employees their desire to make the relationship a "two-way street" as if this mutual dependency were a unilateral concession on their side, when the situation is significantly different as the history of labor unions has revealed. It is indisputable that, as an associate, you are bound to follow the instructions of your manager but, as your boss, they are equally bound by your performance: in the end, hiring a new person for a team is only justifiable if there is hole that cannot be covered (by abilities or by simple capacity) by the rest of the team, and in fact the responsibility chain could be re-framed as if your boss were the servant of their employees, the one that ensures that they do not find any obstacles in making headway with their jobs, which is where the true value of the team's output lies. In other words, when the manager is requesting two-way communication what they are actually saying is "do not let me find the problems (for which I am accountable) on my own, please support me by reporting these problems as soon as you see them". So no concession on that side.

This reciprocal dependency is very prominent even in situations of much more direct personal services as clearly depicted in the epoch drama Downton Abbey, which I have recently watched with Karen on Netflix: having a butler and a housekeeper to run the great house frees the masters from many of the daily chores, but by the same circumstance it also shackles them to the servants, because the masters would not be able to do without them. In this case the masters are, at the same time, the employers and the clients, but it is still in their best interest to ensure that their employees are able and willing to do their jobs as expected. Admittedly, only the masters can fire an under-performing footman, but they will also be in distress (albeit a fairly comfortable one) if they were to find a replacement that would have to be trained in the standards of the house.

Photo: noluck

But this kind of dependency is not limited to the relationships between people: the things we own also own us in some sense, at least from the point of view of being able to require attention or even work from us. When we buy a car we own it, but we are bound to its maintenance to ensure that it stays in working condition for a reasonable amount of time, because otherwise all the money that we have invested in it goes lost. In the case of houses, they not only demand attention, but they also limit our ability to move around; we can always take a car with us if we find a better job, but the only way with a house is waiting for it to be sold, because the investment is normally so substantial that we cannot just take off and leave it behind.

The objects we own and use also end up binding us through the reliance we have on them. If we know we do not have a power drill in the garage we will carefully plan when to put together the next bookcase, because we might have to take a quick drive to the store to buy one. But the plan might be significantly different if we know we have it: we might think of devoting Labor Day or any other public holiday to constructing the next piece of furniture... only to find that the drill is not working, forcing us to revisit our plans.

One final way our possessions enslave us is through the emotional attachment: once we get to appreciate an object that we have been yearning for a long time, or once we get that family heirloom, you father's pocket watch, you grandmother's brooch, we are bound by the fact that these things have a value that is only apparent to us. Nobody will feel as compelled to their preservation as you, and neither will anybody be as deeply affected by their eventual loss. To a certain extent, they get to hold a part of you (in the guise of Lord Voldermort's horcruxes in the Harry Potter saga), which makes them way more valuable that their usual exchange value might indicate.

There has been, however, a solution to all these dependencies for centuries. It is what Buddhism preaches as "detachment", being aware that all things in the world are temporary and we are only their provisional owner, employer, parent, friend, neighbor, before they move on or simply cease to exist, and the attachment to these relationship, on top of being the source of endless pain, is also unjustified, as we do not get full control of them in the same fashion that we do not have full control even of ourselves.

If these reflections sound daunting to you, please do not fret. They are just the realization of how important is to be aware of our mutual dependencies, but also of how ephemeral they are; to learn to appreciate them because they are special and, at the same time, not to covet them because they can vanish into thin air. And with this idea I leave you for today. Have a nice evening.